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Laura Gemser stars as Black Emanuelle again in Joe D'Amato's exploitation erotica. Severin Films USA R0 DVD.
Photo-journalist Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) is travelling back to America after taking a break away from civilisation on a desert island. Meeting with her boss, Emanuelle is sent out to India to interview Guru Shanti (George Eastman) who is teaching wild new ideas about sex to Americans (who can afford to pay). However after meeting a woman who was raped in Rome, Emanuelle bores of this sleazy reporting and decides she wants to make a difference to the world, to this end she flies to Italy to meet Cora Norman (Karen Schubert) who is writing a piece on a white slave trade - young women being kidnapped from the streets of Rome and sold as bargaining chips in oil trades. To get a story however, Emanuelle soon finds that she will have to place herself in danger...
Continuing the on-going storyline, Emanuelle is a photo-journalist, paid to travel the world in search of a good story. This time however, instead of just liberating repressed couples (Emanuelle in Bangkok) being a peeping Tom (Emanuelle in America) or simply having a lot of sex (Black Emanuelle), she develops a concience and tackles some deeper issues - in this case white slavery and women being kidnapped from Italy and sold overseas. As a result the film has a lot more storyline than some of the other productions, as Emanuelle delves deeper and deeper into the white slave trade conspiracy and often puts herself at risk. There are some interesting characters, most notably Dr. Malcolm Robertson who keeps cropping up throughout the film, while the Indian guru sequence has some good comic moments and the film as a whole is well paced and quite unpredictable.
Unfortunately it is clear that by 1977 the filmmakers were being pushed into including ever more shocking and sex filled sequences and a lot of the flow of the storyline is lost beneath some rather gratuitous sex scenes (a lesbian encounter on a boat seems to be completely unnecessary, between two people who are not even characters) and shock scenes (some brutal rapes and hints at beastiality [not so much hinted at in the film's XXX cut!]). The shock sequences in particular make the film a little harder to watch than the earlier Black Emanuelle but will certainly please the sleaze fans. The ending does seem particularly unnecessary, a tacked on sequence that seems to exist just to show another rape scene, although the conclusion is rather fitting.
Director Joe D'Amato is clearly at home here and directs the film very well throughout - however there do seem to be some problems with the editing; Emanuelle travels between various countries throughout the film, yet it is often hard for us to tell when one place ends and another begins, a few stock shots of planes or boats might have been helpful in clarifying matters. Several scenes seem to cut away very quickly, most notably a rape scene in the white slaver's villa cuts straight into the characters walking out of a police station and cheats us of the police raid - an anticipated action highlight of the film. In keeping with the aim to outdo previous films in the series, the sex scenes are longer and more explicit than before, although this does mean that they can drag a little in places. The soundtrack again comes from Nico Fidenco with a suitably cheesy opening soundtrack (that sounds disturbingly like something from ABBA) and some solid incidental music.
Laura Gemser is back in her trademark role and looks as good and beautiful as ever. The more mature, but still attractive Karen Schubert returns from the original Black Emanuelle to play her comrade Cora Norman, while the big Spaghetti Western veteran George Eastman is heavily made-up to play the Indian guru while Ivan Rassimov returns from Emanuelle in Bangkok (1976) in a recurring role.
Emaneulle Around the World is somewhat contradictory - while it chooses to take the Emanuelle character into deeper territory, it does so with a completely fictional issue and certainly never looks to become a 'message movie' and while it adds a more detailed storyline than the often quite plotless early films in the series, it largely buries these under a load of sleaze and gratuitous sex. Fans of Laura Gemser, Joe D'Amato and the Black Emanuelle series will find plenty to enjoy here, but it is certainly not the best of their work.
| Anyone famous in it? | Laura Gemser - the very popular erotic film star who also appeared in Violence in a Women's Prison (1982) George Eastman - best known as the star of D'Amato's video nasty Antropophagus (1980) |
| Directed by anyone interesting? | Joe D'Amato - the Italian director who shot over 100 films, starting with Spaghetti Westerns before eventually descending into hardcore porn in the 1990s with films like Sex Penitentiary (1996) and Some Like It Hard (1995) |
| Any gore or violence? | Some violent rape scenes. |
| Any sex or nudity? | This print includes extensive female nudity and some male nudity. Borders on hardcore at points. A hardcore print of the film is also available - see the XXX Review for details. |
| Who is it for? | One for fans of the series, or anyone who enjoys their sex films on the sleazy side. |
| Black Emanuelle (1975) | Bitto Albertini's first film - a rather loosely plotted affair that focuses mainly on a series of erotic sex scenes. |
| Black Emanuelle series | Joe D'Amato's five film series of increasingly sleazy adventures for Laura Gemser's Emanuelle. |
| Visuals | Original Aspect Ratio - 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. Colour The print quality is generally good, with good colours and detail and only mild grain. There are a lot of light scratches and marks throughout the print which can be distracting in a few scenes but are generally ignorable. Note: The opening and closing credit scenes are noticably lower quality, very soft like from a video source. |
| Audio | English and Italian audio. Both sound fine and the English dub is well done. |
| Subtitles | English (optional) - these translate the Italian track which is noticably different to the English dub. |
| Extras | The disc includes:
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| Region | Region 0 (ALL) - NTSC |
| Availability | Available on its own or as part of the limited edition Black Emanuelle Box. |
| Other regions? | Previously only available in English on a Russian DVD. |
| Cuts? | The print used here is the uncut softcore version prepared for most markets. A hardcore version containing about 3 minutes more footage was prepared for some countries is also being released by Severin Films on DVD [more details]. The print used here has French language credits.
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